The thoughts of a Touch MVP

Sometimes I get the feeling the Dutch are pretty much of a gadget freak. Somehow we are always one of the firsts to try out new things, to play with new toys and to advocate new technologies. Since we have quite a small population (about 16 million people) I find it rather amazing that everytime there is something new and cool, you’ll always find some Dutch there.

Same goes for Surface. Dr. Neil Roodyn told me once that no matter where he gave his Surface training, there was always at least one Dutch guy in the room. I’ve heard that the Dutch have, relative to the number of people, the largest installed units in the world!

Of course, “a lot of Dutch Surface users” isn’t enough for me. So in order to make people in the Netherlands more aware of the possibilities of Surface and to help companies make the right decisions, we’ve decided to launch the Dutch Surface User Group.

In this usergroup we will focus on three main areas.

1. What? Here we will answer all questions on what Surface actually is, what the hardware is like, how to deploy it, etc.

2. Why? This is a bit harder: why should a company invest in the hardware and the knowlegde around Surface? What is the business case for a Surface machine? What will be the benefit of an organization should they decide to purchase a Surface unit?

3. How? The how is more on the software side of things. We will help out the developers with the struggles every starting Surface Dev faces in the beginning. How do you use the SDK? How do you accomplish a certain task in WPF?

In order to answer those questions we will organize real life meetings (after all, things are much easier to explain when you have access to the hardware!), we will blog (such as this blog!), we will give lectures and we will maintain a forum.

The site of the UG is (all in dutch) http://surface.dotned.nl The UG is part of the larger dotNed community, which currently is the largest .net usergroup in the Netherlands (of which I happen to be the chairman, but that’s besides the point :-) )

We hope it will be a success and that we will be able to make Surface even more succesfull!